1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to the field of maintaining information handling systems, and more particularly to a method and system for targeting alerts to information handling systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Information handling system manufacturers build and distribute information handling systems with a wide variety of hardware and software configurations. For instance, consumers often order different configurations of information handling systems to achieve desired price and performance constraints, and software and hardware manufacturers often change components as bugs are fixed and improvements added. In a dynamic manufacturing environment, available information handling system configurations often evolve rapidly with improved performance and greater consumer options for selecting hardware and software components. However, the evolving nature of information handling system configurations increases the difficulty faced by both manufacturers and users in maintaining information handling systems with updated components and software.
In order to aid consumers in maintaining information handling systems up to date, hardware and software component manufacturers often develop improvements and fixes to bugs that are distributed through the Internet. For instance, if a video card manufacturer learns of a driver fault when a video card is used with a particular sound card, the video card manufacturer typically develops an updated driver that fixes the fault and provides the updated driver to information handling system manufacturers for use in newly built information handling systems. In addition, the video card manufacturer and the information handling system manufacturer often post the new driver on the Internet so that users of existing information handling systems are able to download the new driver. However, unless users are made aware of the new driver they often will not download it. Users often learn of an updated driver by calling for technical assistance when the difficulty arises that led to the development of the updated driver, but calls for technical assistance are typically expensive to support. As an alternative, information handling system manufacturers could send alerts to all users each time updated drivers are posted, however, widespread dissemination of alerts results in notification to users who do not use or need the update. Rather than reduce service calls for technical assistance, unnecessary alert notices increase the number of user queries as users attempt to determine which alerts are relevant to their information handling system.